Thanks to African Voices for permission to reprint the following photo and poem, also available online at http://mad.ly/cc1564?pact=19716413686&fe=1. Thanks also to the photographer, JoAnn Cheathan, and the poet, Gha’il Rhodes Benjamin.

U was never
Ordinary
Nor stationary
Nor regular
U was always
Using your pen
As sword
Fighting/ tearing down
In-justices in high and low places

U was never silent but/ even when u wasn’t
sayin’ a word
your words spoke endless decades of life and
death on pages as
permanent as the equations of brownskinned
mathematicians encoding
sanctuaries of memories in our veins
your words
a drum never losing tempo
escorting us beyond blabbering repertoires of
rhetoric

U is OUR poet laureate
cause can’t nobody
slice through the BS like you do

uncensored u stand with DIG-nity
straight from the gut
on your tongue the melody of
ancestral footsteps running in horrific discord
u say the words the deaf can hear
u speak the words that
pierce a seeing man’s eyes into blinding truths

U 75 now, they tell me
but what do that mean
with a man moving full steam ahead
up/down every avenue
all at once boiling
bleaching
the lies out of his-tories’ illusive fabrications

fore you even changed your name
it was your name
waiting for the change that you came to become
you been here always
scripting out
the next revolution
documenting how it went down FOREAL

“judge a man by his deeds” the old folks say
your deeds ain’t nowhere near done
but one thing for sure
u was never ordinary
u was never hesitant
sitting
waiting for somebody else
to say what needed to be said
u was always adding another word
to even the score on the wall

Please Support Andrea Sears' Reporting

Unemployment insurance is running out for Andrea Sears of Left Voices, former WBAI/Pacifica News Editor, who was part of the WBAI staff layoffs last August. Despite some promising interviews, Andrea does not have a job yet, and would really appreciate your support.